Monday, 21 March 2016

How To Optimize Images for SEO and Search traffic [all in one guide]

Today, we decided to tell you how important are images in terms of SEO. Here with the help of this article you will learn how to do SEO for images and how to maximize your search engine ranking with optimizing photos. Just read all the points thoroughly and be a pro SEO expert.

How to write seo-friendly alt-text for your images.

Title Tags: these tags are used for showing the title of images. This tags tells what the image is. Title Tags are good for images as whenever a user hover on the image he will get the title of the image. This creates a user friendly environment for your blog visitors. As we know there is a huge debate about title tags for SEO but we know it's better to be on the safe side and use it for rich user friendly environment.

Alt Tags: Google puts a lot of weight on alt tags. Alt Tags shows when a image in not present or not available. These tags are used for putting keywords of your articles. Nowadays peoples are putting all their keywords on alt and title tags. This act as keyword stuffing and their sites will surely get banned from search engines. So how to write seo-friendly alt-text for your images?

First of all pick a relevant image for your article.

Make a list of your main keywords on articles.

Match your keywords with your image.

Select a maximum of 3 keywords and write them in alt tags without repetition.

Example.

How to write alt tags for image seo.

And not. How to write seo friendly alt tag which are seo friendly by using alt tags for images.

Image Properties of Blogger

If you make a habit of writing short and descriptive alt tags then you will get huge benefits from search engines otherwise you will be penalized for keywords stuffing.

Image Optimization Best-Practice: Captions

Infi Blogger Logo

Image captions have a indirect relation with search engine rankings. You are thinking of or finding relation between both terms.
Do you know bounce rates can impact your search engine rankings. Do you know what is bounce rate?

When a user click on your link from search result page and leaves your site and visit back to search engine , it tells search engines that your site's content was not relevant to the search query and that's why you will loose your rankings gradually.
However their is a fact that people are lazy and may read only readings and captions of images. Due to this fact image caption can make your content interactive and decreases the chances of visitors leaving your site. This will reduce your bounce rate and will help you in better search results.
So always make a habit of writing good image captions to reduce bounce rates.

Use commonly supported file types

It's a general recommendation to use widely supported image formats such as JPEG and png. But for seo purposes you should consider using JPEG files as first choice and png as second choice. The idea is to use those image formats which are supported by all browsers and platforms so that your visitors will always see your images.

Use clear and descriptive file names

It's a good habit to rename your image files with keywords of your articles.
For example: if you have a file dsc0001.jpeg and a Web crawler want to index your file then how will he index your site? That's the reason your should consider using keywords in your image like Apple-Iphone6s.JPEG so that Web crawlers like Google images will index them in appropriate places and you will get benefits from search traffic. But again if you use many keywords in your file name then you will be consider as spammy by Google bots.

Reduce the files sizes of your images/ photos/ screenshots

There are lots of tool which are know for providing page speed of Web pages. Google have page speed insight tool that will mark your Webpages on a scale of 100 and will list all the good and bad part of your website's which are responsible for your Web page loading times. So why Web page loading times are important? As a report on Google tells us that average of 70% people's closes a site which took more than 3 seconds to load. So if you have heavy Web pages full of images then your Web pages will be heavy and then your visitors will leave your site in frustration.

So to make your Web pages lighter you need to optimize your images first by converting them to jpeg type and setting the minimum acceptable resolution.

Generally your image sizes will be under 75 Kb which are not define by standards but are good practices.

Scale down for image SEO

As I already explained above that page loading times are very important aspect in SEO. Here comes to optimize your images to a great extent. Images are more heavy than your text but still images makes a good impression on readers. A image can tell you 1000 words story in less space. However images are of bigger sizes and can impact your page loading times.

Here scaling helps to make your Web page lighter. Example: suppose you have a 1080* 1920 resolution image and you are using it on your blog at 250* 250 resolution. Then go this situation the image will load fully but will show on a lower resolution. So it becomes necessary to crop those images or simply reducing their scaling sizes to make them lighter than ever. If you are using Blogger's blogspot blog then you don't need to scale your images because this task is done automatically by blogger.

Alignment left, right or center

Alignment always makes huge impact on your blog articles. Poorly align images can be neglected by blog readers. If you ask me on image alignment then I will tell you for going with centered images. Centered images looks beautiful and have high interaction with readers.
But still left alignment with lines surrounding images can be a good choice of alignment.

Helpful seo image optimization Tips for bloggers

Don't use big size or big resolution images on your blog/ website and simply optimize them for faster loading.

Use basic version of images and provide high resolution of images to only those users who wants them. Example: use of low src tag in your Img tags.

Use tools for compressing your images without loosing image quality and resolution.

Use only necessary and related images on your articles.

Optimize images in such a way so that resulted images will have size less than 75 Kb.

Consider using CSS whenever possible instead of images.

Consider using separate sitemap for images and your articles.

That's all the image SEO tips for google that I can provide to you. I hope you understand every point clearly. Please feel free to ask anything in comment section. Thanks for being a loyal reader.